On the eve of NATO’s Vilnius Summit, we are publishing a detailed report by Lev Golinkin of the American Forward periodical on the glorification of fascism and Nazism in Lithuania.
There are hundreds of statues and monuments in Canada, the United States and around the world to people who abetted or took part in the murder of Jews and other minorities during the Holocaust. The Forward has, for the first time, documented them in this collection of articles. For a guide to each country’s memorials click here.
(January 26, 2021) Vilnius — In many ways, Lithuania pioneered the glorification of Nazi collaborators on a state level. It has perverted museums and tourist sites; celebrated perpetrators as national heroes; persecuted Holocaust survivors who defended themselves with pre-trial investigations for “war crimes;” destroyed a prominent author’s livelihood for the crime of admitting Lithuanians participated in the Holocaust; and is debating denialist legislation similar to Poland’s.
As part of the whitewashing, Lithuania installed numerous monuments, including these to brutal collaborator Jonas Noreika (1910–1947), aka General Storm. Above left is a plaque to Noreika on the Wroblewskis Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in central Vilnius; above right, his name on the wall of national heroes on Vilnius’ Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights.
(Many thanks to Defending History founder Dovid Katz for his invaluable guidance on Lithuania and permission to use Defending History’s Lithuania photos. For more on Dovid’s crucial role in the vanguard of identifying and combating Holocaust distortion, see intro.)
Šukioniai — Noreika is also honoured with a plaque in Šiauliai, a street in Kaunas (using his nom de guerre General Storm), a school and this monument in his home village, above right. See The New York Times report, the Baltic News Network story on U.S. State Department and Noreika and Defending History’s Noreika page.
For more on Noreika, see Salon and Times of Israel articles by his granddaughter Silvia Foti, who set out to write a book about her grandfather, only to discover he was a Nazi collaborator.
Vilnius and Kaunas — Both cities have streets glorifying June 23, 1941. On that date, six centuries of Jewish life flourishing in Lithuania came to an abrupt and horrific end when the Lithuanian Activist Front and other nationalist groups dehumanized, pillaged and murdered Jews in dozens of locations across Lithuania within hours of the Nazi invasion of the country. See here for eyewitness testimonies.
The wave of antisemitic murder that began on June 23 fed into the subsequent genocide in which the Nazis, with the aid of local collaborators, exterminated 95-96% of Lithuania’s Jews, the highest murder rate in the Holocaust. Above right is the June 23 Street in Vilnius. Above left, in middle of the photo, LAF founder Kazys Škirpa (1895–1979) meets with Hitler.
Kaunas and Namajūnai — A street honouring Škirpa in Kaunas, above left. Škirpa also has a plaque on a government military building in Kaunas and a memorial stone in his birth village of Namajūnai, erected 2016.
In the early months of 1941, while in Germany, Škirpa suggested eliminating Jews from Lithuania. After the war, he decamped to America, where he worked for the Library of Congress. His obituary in the Washington Post portrays Škirpa — the man eagerly served as an envoy to Hitler’s Germany — as a victim of the Germans. Above right, a far-right march in Kaunas with Škirpa as Pepe the Frog, a right wing meme, Feb 1, 2017. Lithuania’s far-right, like that of other nations covered here, often anchors annual gatherings to the glorification of Nazi collaborators.
Ukmergė — Memorial to Juozas Krikštaponis (1912–1945), platoon commander in the 2nd National Labor Security TDA battalion, a paramilitary organized by the Lithuanian provisional government in service of the Nazis. These auxiliary battalions were responsible for systematic mass slaughter in Lithuania and Belarus, killing 26,000 Jews in under six months with such brutality that their overseers complained to SS head Heinrich Himmler of the excesses.
See chilling repots by Evaldas Balčiūnas in Defending History, Grant Gochin in the Times of Israel. (Thanks to Grant Gochin for the Krikštaponis image.)
Kaunas — Bas-relief and lecture hall at Vytautas Magnus University, dedicated in 2007 in honour of Juozas Ambrazevičius Brazaitis (1903–1974), acting prime minister of the provisional Nazi puppet government. Kaunas also has a street named after him.
Brazaitis presided over Lithuania in 1941, when Jews were slaughtered by both Nazis and Lithuanian collaborators. Brazaitis signed orders confirming the creation of Lithuania’s first mass-murder camp; later, he ordered all of Kaunas’ Jews to be imprisoned in a ghetto.
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After the war, Brazaitis emigrated to the West, living in Germany and the U.S. In 2012, a major scandal broke out over the state’s reburial of Brazaitis with full honours. See JTA report and Defending History’s coverage.
Kaunas — A street named after Antanas Baltūsis-Žvejas (1915–1948), brigade commander of the 2nd Lithuanian auxiliary police battalion which guarded the Majdanek concentration camp, where over 75,000 prisoners (mostly Jews) were exterminated or died of illness. See Defending History’s coverage. Above right, a Lithuanian auxiliary policeman auctions off property seized from murdered Jews, 1941.
Vilnius and six other towns — In front of the Lithuanian Ministry of Defense stands an imposing black monument to Jonas Žemaitis aka Žemaitis-Vytautas (1909–1954), who served in the Lithuanian Territorial Defense Force, a volunteer militia created with the aim of providing military aid to the Nazis. Contemporaneous reports make it likely Žemaitis may have served in a Lithuanian auxiliary police battalion — one of the Nazi-organized units that were engaged in operations of mass murder of Jews. See detailed reporting by Evaldas Balčiūnas for Defending History.
Additional honours include a plaque in Šiluva and another in the Kėdainiai Regional Museum (below left); a monument in Raseiniai (below right) and another in Palanga; a bust in the memorial park of Kaunas’ Vytautas the Great War Museum; and schools in Raseiniai and Šimkaičiai.
Žemaitis is also the namesake of the state-run Military Academy of Lithuania, which coordinates with other academies in NATO nations such as the Virginia Military Institute. (See here for a bas-relief of Žemaitis on the academy.)
Kadrėnai and three other locales — a memorial stone to Povilas Plechavičius (1890–1973), who formed and led the Lithuanian Territorial Defense Front, a collaborationist militia created with the full support of the Third Reich. After the war, Plechavičius resettled in Chicago.
Plechavičius also has a bust in the memorial park of Kaunas’ Vytautas the Great War Museum; a memorial plaque and a cadet academy in Kaunas; another memorial plaque in Skuodas; and a square in Panevėžys.
Lazdijai and four other towns — monument to Adolfas Ramanauskas (1918–1957). Ramanauskas commanded one of the many groups in the antisemitic Lithuanian Activist Front. Ramanauskas led his LAF unit in the summer of 1941, when LAF units slaughtered thousands of Jews on their own volition, carrying out lethal pogroms even before the Germans arrived.
While there’s no direct paper trail linking Ramanauskas to murders of Jews, the fact remains he was the leader of a unit in a Nazi-allied militia whose murders and atrocities are well-documented, including by two major articles published by Lithuanian ethicist Evaldas Balčiūnas in 2014 and 2017. The connections were worrisome enough for the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the World Jewish Congress to condemn glorification of Ramanauskas. It also led authorities in New Britain, Conn. to reject plans to erect a Ramanauskas memorial (see U.S. section).
Other honours include a memorial plaque in Lazdiljai and another in Panevėžys; a street in Kaunas; a combat training center in Nemenčinė (with a bust of Ramanauskas on the grounds); and a school in Alytus (with a bust, a plaque and a monument on the grounds).
Below, a 2016 far-right march in Kaunas. The banner proclaims “We know our heroes!” while featuring (from left to right) Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, Jonas Noreika, Povilas Plechavičius, Kazys Škirpa, Antanas Baltūsis-Žvejas and Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis. All are either proven or alleged Nazi collaborators and/or Holocaust perpetrators. Half were welcomed by America after the war. Defending History’s coverage.
For a monument to Adolfas Ramanauskas outside of Lithuania, see the U.S. section.
For more on Lithuania’s widespread Holocaust distortion, see New York Times on Vilnius’ Holocaust museum, with quotes from Defending History’s Dovid Katz, Defending History’s page on other Lithuanian locations honouring Nazi collaborators, and Defending History’s Lithuania page.
For a first-hand account of Lithuanian authorities harassing writers and researchers who wrote about collaborators, see essays by Evaldas Balčiūnas in Defending History.
For the legal aspects, see coverage of Grant Gochin – a man who lost over 100 family members in the Holocaust in Lithuania and who’s bringing legal action against Vilnius’ whitewashing in the European Court of Human Rights. Reports in the Times of Israel and EU Today.
For the fascinating story of Silvia Foti, the granddaughter of Jonas Noreika who was told her grandfather was a hero only to discover he was a Holocaust perpetrator, see Silvia Foti’s blog and articles in Salon and the Chicago Tribune.
How many monuments honour fascists, Nazis and murderers of Jews? You’ll be shocked.
Lev Golinkin, January 26, 2021
The most curious thing about last year’s protests that toppled statues of slavers and colonizers is that the monuments of Holocaust perpetrators didn’t even make headlines.
Yet a Forward investigation reveals there are hundreds of statues and monuments in the United States and around the world to people who abetted or took part in the murder of Jews and others during the Holocaust.
The Nazi collaborators of Central and Eastern Europe weren’t as fastidious at keeping records as their Third Reich allies, which makes it difficult to arrive at a precise number of their victims. As a rough estimate, the Nazi collaborators honoured with monuments on U.S. soil represent governments, death squads and paramilitaries that murdered a half million Jews, Poles and Bosnians.
Holocaust perpetrators is the correct term for these men and organizations, for they played an integral part in the Final Solution, arresting and deporting Jews to concentration camps or gunning them down in the forests and fields of Eastern Europe (one-third of all Holocaust victims were killed in what’s called the “Holocaust by bullets”).https://www.google.com/maps/d/embed?mid=1sW6RPe7rwDKlFNa7micTeQezCpomKof3
Without collaborators like the ones who occupy pedestals across America, the Holocaust as we know it couldn’t have happened.
On Jan. 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Forward is publishing the first-ever database of monuments to Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators. It lists 320 monuments and street names in 16 countries on three continents which represent men and organizations who’ve enabled — and often quite literally implemented — the Final Solution.
In downtown Manhattan, along Broadway’s “Canyon of Heroes,” are memorial plaques to Henri Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval, the head and prime minister of France’s collaborationist Vichy government which hunted down and deported 67,000 Jews to the concentration camps. In addition to his Broadway plaque, Pétain is honoured with 11 streets in the U.S. France has gotten rid of its Pétain streets, but the ones in America remain.
Petain, at least, was a WWI hero before turning traitor. The same cannot be said for some of the other honourees with statues in America. Here’s a sampling of other honourees in the U.S.:
- Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, who have busts in upstate New York and Wisconsin. Bandera headed a faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which allied itself with the Nazis and whose members eagerly participated in the Holocaust. Shukhevych, another Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists figure, was a leader in a Third Reich auxiliary battalion that carried out lethal antisemitic operations in service of the Nazis. Later, Shukhevych commanded the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which massacred thousands of Jews and 70,000 to 100,000 Polish civilians. There are additional Ukrainian nationalist busts in New York and Ohio.
- Andrey Vlasov, the Soviet general who went over to the Nazis and raised an army of over 100,000 men for the Third Reich, has a memorial just outside New York.
- Dragoljub Mihailović, who led the Serbian Chetnik paramilitary that fought with Nazi Germany and carried out ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims, has statues in Cleveland, Milwaukee and two Chicago suburbs.
- Chicago also has a memorial to Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, who commanded a unit of the Lithuanian Activist Front, a Nazi-allied organization whose members slaughtered Jews across Lithuania in the summer of 1941.
The situation in America pales in comparison to European nations which are teeming with hundreds of statues and streets honouring collaborators.
To jump directly to a country-by-country list of memorials to Nazi perpetrators and collaborators click here.
Even more worrying than the sheer number is the overall trend. The vast majority of these statues were erected in the past 20 years. Recent studies point to the staggering spread of Holocaust ignorance: two-thirds of U.S. millennials don’t know what Auschwitz is, while a third of Europeans know little to nothing about the Holocaust. The growth of statues to perpetrators, however, evinces a far deeper problem. The Holocaust isn’t just being forgotten, it’s being perverted via historical revisionism that is turning butchers into heroes.
The biggest reason to pay attention to this disturbing pattern is that these monuments signal not only an attack on Holocaust memory but the presence of organized white supremacy that is focused on far more than history.
In 2017, America was shocked to see neo-Nazis with torches march in the defense of Robert E. Lee’s statue in Charlottesville. But the marchers didn’t chant about Robert E. Lee — they chanted “Jews will not replace us,” a chief tenet of the white genocide theory that motivated the Pittsburgh synagogue and El Paso terrorist attacks. The white supremacists rallied around a 19th century general, but their minds and actions were focused on the present, with deadly results.
The same is happening across the Atlantic, only to a greater degree. Wherever you see statues of Nazi collaborators, you’ll also find thousands of torch-carrying men, rallying, organizing, drawing inspiration for action by celebrating collaborators of the past.
You’ll see it in Viktor Orban’s Hungary, where far-right figures use elaborate ceremonies anchored to WWII anniversaries to draw neo-Nazis across Europe; Ukraine, where the rehabilitators of Bandera work to turn the country into a hub of transnational white supremacy; Croatia, where men carrying WWII fascist symbols marched in support of Donald Trump; and France, where the far-right Marine LePen rallies supporters by insisting that France has no responsibility for the Holocaust. You’ll see it in a dozen other nations as well.
The monuments and the figures they honour stand at a crossroads of fascism and neo-fascism, the losers of WWII and today’s white supremacists who believe they’re on the brink of a global race war. It’s impossible to understand one without understanding the other, which is why tracking the growth of Nazi collaborator monuments is so crucial. These statues don’t just disparage the dead; they warn the living.
Nazi collaborator memorials by country
Click on the links below for the Forward’s guide to each country’s memorials honouring the perpetrators and enablers of the Holocaust.
For more information on this project, see the methodology page.
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